Prophets and Their Societies

Emmet, Dorothy

doi:10.2307/2844048

Cited by 25 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Beyond exploring how cultic location functioned in the case of the Hebrew prophets, Berger's essay does not give us much help in actually identifying, in our own context, the social locations from which genuinely novel social and moral insights might be effectively launched. Emmet's“Prophets and Their Societies” is helpful because she undertakes to do just that, by means of an unusual construal of “calling” or “vocation.” She argues that an exploration of the prophet is pertinent to understanding “how institutions in fact work and get adapted to new needs” (1956, 23).…”

Section: “The Angry Poetry Of the Prophets”mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Though this places the prophetic individual within the social system in the sense that she or he carries out a social function within it, it could certainly be argued that it still treats the prophet as an outsider. That prophets are “forerunners of the kind of morality which is about to become appropriate” (Emmet 1956, 14) does not change the fact that at the time, their beliefs and behaviors are regarded as so threatening to the social system as to be intolerable. In any case, such a view of prophecy, helpful as it may be in understanding the high cost of moral innovation, is, in her view, too limited because “it only takes into consideration those prophetic people who have been condemned as deviants,” whereas, in Emmet's view, there are many people who ought properly to be credited as prophetic “who have been able to live peacefully as founders, or reformers, or educators” (1956, 14).…”

Section: “The Angry Poetry Of the Prophets”mentioning

confidence: 99%

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OF EAGLES AND CROWS, LIONS AND OXEN: Blake and the Disruption of Ethics

Yeager¹

2009

Journal of Religious Ethics

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Why focus on the work of William Blake in a journal dedicated to religious ethics? The question is neither trivial nor rhetorical. Blake's work is certainly not in anyone's canon of significant texts for the study of Christian or, more broadly, religious ethics. Yet Blake, however subversive his views, sought to lay out a Christian vision of the good, alternated between prophetic denunciations of the world's folly and harrowing laments over the wreck of the world's promise, and wrote poetry as if poetry might mend the world. Setting imagination against the calculations of reason and the comfort of custom, Blake's poems inspire questions about the relationship of ethics to prophecy, and open the possibility that ethics itself would be markedly enriched could it find a place for what Thomas J. J. Altizer has called Christian epic poetry.

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Section: “The Angry Poetry Of the Prophets”mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: “The Angry Poetry Of the Prophets”mentioning

confidence: 99%

OF EAGLES AND CROWS, LIONS AND OXEN: Blake and the Disruption of Ethics

Yeager¹

2009

Journal of Religious Ethics

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“…(1) The 'call' by means of a supernatural experience or 'vocational struggle' 51 occurs in the future folk saint's life and initiates his career. (2) Offering a practical religion with solutions to physical and personal problems, the saint attracts individuals who are seeking such solace and remedy.…”

Section: Three North Mexican Folk Saint Movements Io5mentioning

confidence: 99%

Three North Mexican Folk Saint Movements

Macklin

Crumrine

1973

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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In each of the three cases presented, the changing role of the folk saint as well as the development of the movement indicate that a four-stage transformation is in operation:(1) The ‘call’ by means of a supernatural experience or ‘vocational struggle’ occurs in the future folk saint's life and initiates his career.(2) Offering a practical religion with solutions to physical and personal problems, the saint attracts individuals who are seeking such solace and remedy. Common purpose, journey and encampment near the curer foster group identity.(3)Myths about the miracle worker grow in the group and circulate abroad, intensifying group solidarity and attracting new adherents. Administrators and would-be exploiters enter. A transcendent ideology is introduced with social, political, and religious ramifications. These may be at once restorative and innovative. The success of the folk saint spawns other saints who also attract followers.(4) External, traditional power structures are threatened, and retaliate by applying political pressure, so that the last stage sees the decline and eclipse of the movement, and the loss of its innovative elements. The saint, no longer a potential secular power, devotes himself to curing, thus reemphasizing the culturally defined, traditional role of curandero or hitolio.

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“…Yeager suggests that Blake's theology “was too deviant to be seriously engaged” by the readers of his time (Yeager , 17, discussing Emmet ). Merriman notes the mythic and cryptic nature of Blake's language, and suggests that it alienates Blake's audience from his vision.…”

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confidence: 99%

Re‐embedding Moral Agency

Steck¹

2013

Journal of Religious Ethics

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The connection between ethics and theological vision has become increasingly important for ethics as we better appreciate how the moral agent is embedded in a framework that affectively and intellectually shapes her moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is always reasoning within (that is, within a moral framework, a religious worldview, and/or a set of ideological commitments). A similar framing occurs in literature, which I refer to as its “horizon.” A literary text's horizon comprises the theological and metaphysical commitments that are implied by the text and that the reader relies on to make sense of it. I suggest that there is a parallel between how moral frameworks and literary horizons operate in that both shape moral judgment. I argue that in using literature as a resource for ethics, the same contemporary currents that have led us to appreciate the embeddedness of moral reasoning should also encourage us to give more careful attention to the theological or metaphysical vision implied by a text. Such a “theo‐ethical” reading of literature provides a richer understanding of particular moral goods and the interplay between those goods and ethical themes like agency, hope, and redemption. I substantiate this claim with a reading of William Blake's Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion.

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Prophets and Their Societies

Cited by 25 publications

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OF EAGLES AND CROWS, LIONS AND OXEN: Blake and the Disruption of Ethics

OF EAGLES AND CROWS, LIONS AND OXEN: Blake and the Disruption of Ethics

Three North Mexican Folk Saint Movements

Re‐embedding Moral Agency

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